Nonplussed by Google+

I mentioned in my reading round-up for July that a lot of the article I have read over the past month have been about Google+. There are links to the best and most useful articles at the bottom of this post.

What I want to share with you here is my first reaction to Google+ and my experience one month in. And that can be described in one word…

Meh!

I just don’t get it, or perhaps more accurately I just don’t need it. I got an invite quite early on and set about creating some circles. What I found was that I was just replicating my networks from Twitter and Facebook. But what’s the point in that?

Facebook works perfectly well for me as a way to communicate online with my friends and family. Twitter works perfectly well for me as a way of sharing information and getting involved with my professional network.

Yes, I see that the theory behind Google+ is to bring both of those networks into one place to make it easier to share and communicate with selected groups. But at the moment it’s just not working for me, and why is that the case? I don’t want to have to specify for every single post I make who that content gets shared with. It’s as simple as that.

Julia Turner summed my feelings up perfectly in the Google+ segment on a recent edition of the Slate Culture Gabfest (which I would thoroughly recommend you listen to, it starts at around 17min):